Suddenly, he reached his hand out for my face. I recoiled but not quickly enough. He grabbed hold of my chin and forced me to lock eyes with him.
“What has this got to do with me?” I asked through clenched teeth. “Who gives a damn who liked who thirty years ago?”
Brian laughed. It was a horrific, ugly sound. “You know, other than your eyes, you’re the spitting image of your mother. It’s hard for me to look at you. Especially after the bitch put that restraining order out on me—as if I was going to let that stop me. She was mine.”
A creeping shiver went up my spine. This was bad. Brian Feldman was insane. And there was no way to predict what a crazy person might do.
I forced myself to maintain conversation even as he leered at me. “If—if a restraining order wouldn’t stop you, then what did you do?”
“Oh, wouldn’t you like to know?” He laughed, a disturbing glint in his eyes that told me to prepare for the worst. “You should have been the product of it. I thought you were mine. For years and years when I was in prison, I dreamed of meeting my daughter, and then I saw you—took one look at you and knew. Those damn eyes. You were never mine. You were Liam’s. All the hope I’d been clinging to was shattered once again by that bastard you call your father.”
He continued on as if I weren’t there. “So, I’d set myself up to take him down—get you thrown in jail so you could live through just a taste of what your parents did to me. And it was such a convenient guise under which the Russian mob could try to take down Liam. Or that leader of theirs they don’t like. To be honest, I didn’t care for that side of the plan, but I needed their manpower to pull all this off, and someone owed me a favor, so there you go. It worked like a charm. I knew the best way for me to get revenge against Liam O’Leary was to take someone he loves.”
He paused, tilting my head from side to side as he regarded me. I didn’t know what he was looking for or if he was looking for anything at all. Maybe he was waiting for me to speak.
I didn’t.
“And so…here we are, Kirsten.”
What was I supposed to say? I felt like I couldn’t speak. This man—this monster—had attacked my mother, around the time she became pregnant with me. What if the trauma and stress from that had affected her pregnancy? What if—what if what Brian had done to my mother had indirectly killed her?
Suddenly, I was full of unfathomable rage, enough to overwrite the fear I’d been feeling.
I wrenched my face away from his hand, biting down hard when he tried to grab on to me again.
“You sick son of a bitch,” I spat out as he furiously wiped blood away from the side of his hand. I was happy to see I’d broken the skin.
“Funny,” he growled, “that’s what your mother said to me before I made love to her.”
I reached out my hand to slap him, but he caught hold of my wrist and squeezed it in his iron grip. I couldn’t help gasping in pain—the man was strong. When I saw his eyes roving over my dress, a fear that had nothing to do with whether I might die tonight came over me.
He wanted something else.
And with my sprained ankle, and a locked door, and armed guards on the other side, there was nowhere for me to go. I couldn’t escape from the sociopath right in front of my eyes.
“You know, maybe it isn’t fair to send you to prison, Kirsten. You didn’t do anything wrong, after all,” Brian said as he stood up, keeping hold of my wrist as he rose. He loomed over me, using his height against me. “But if you don’t go to prison, I’ll have to find another way to exact my revenge on your father.”
I tried to back my chair away, but he caught the edge of the frame with his other hand. He ran his lips over the back of my wrist as he sneered at me.
My blood felt like it was made of ice.
“I think I know exactly how.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I was all frayed nerves, fear, and adrenaline when we finally reached the warehouse. There were two cars outside, which seemed to match up to Sergei’s assumption that this was the right place. The lights were on—another good sign.
That also meant the building and its perimeter were likely teeming with armed Russian mob members. When the car Matt, Katya, Sergei, and Patrick were in drove beside Detective Peters’ car, Matt rolled down the window to talk to us.
“That’s a lot of guns to get through.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be anything legal about getting through them all,” I murmured in reply. Charles threw me a look.
“We’re waiting for back-up. I’ve sent word we need it. It should be here in ten minutes.”
I resisted the urge to scream at the man. Looking at Ian, he clearly suffered through the same urge.
“Charles, we can’t—I don’t think we have ten minutes to wait.” I turned to look at Liam, whose mouth was set in a grim but determined line. “From what you told me about Feldman, the guy is a complete psycho. We can’t possibly give him ten minutes.”
Liam shook his head. “I’m not sparing even a second.” He looked over at Sergei who was in the other car with his phone to his ear. “Are your men in position?”
Sergei nodded.
“Just so long as you don’t catch them, right?” I threw back at Charles. He held his head in his hands.
“If this doesn’t work, then never mind early retirement—I’ll be fired.” But then he sighed. “Do it. Feldman’s case file gives me reason to agree with you. We don’t have five minutes.”
We watched from our cars as the sounds of gunfire filled the air. There was yelling and cursing and other sounds of alarm. After a few minutes of deafening noise, there was silence. When I attempted to get out of the car, Sergei held up his hand.
“Wait a minute. Let my men clear away the traitors.”
Charles spluttered in disbelief. “You can’t just take them all away.”
“I can. Besides, my men didn’t kill any of them if they could avoid it…merely wounded them. I have some questions I want answered.” He almost laughed at the look on Charles’ face. “You have eyewitnesses who could I.D. some guys from Ringo’s, right?”
He nodded.
“Then when I’m done with them, I’ll send them your way. With your eyewitness accounts, you’ll be able to put them away for good. Does that work for you?”
Charles seemed to be struggling internally, but then he nodded. “Fine. It’s the best deal I could hope to get from you people.”
Sergei grinned humorlessly. “Then I’d say it’s time to go in and steal back Miss Irish.”
True to his word, the warehouse was eerily empty of the Russian mob and Sergei’s men. I couldn’t help wondering about how they’d escaped. All that was left were smears of blood here and there, a testament to the short yet brutal fight that had taken place while we sat in our cars outside.
Therein lay our problem. The warehouse was empty. Kirsten and Feldman were nowhere to be seen.
“Sergei, you were sure Feldman would still be with the mob,” Katya cried out in despair. Despite all of us having tried to convince her to stay at Capone’s, or at least to stay in the car, the woman had point-blank refused. I guess we’d all forgotten she’d been just as much a part of the violent, bloody life surrounding us as we all were.
Sergei fired her a look. “I still don’t think I’m wrong. Search the warehouse and the area behind it thoroughly.”
Charles and I went in one direction, a still silent Ian with his brother Patrick in another. Both Liam and Sergei paired up to check outside—an odd sight I never thought I’d get over. Matt and Katya investigated the front of the warehouse.
After ten minutes of searching, there was nothing to be found.
Ian caught my eye from the other side of the warehouse. At this distance, I could see he was distraught. What could we do?
Where was Kirsten? If she wasn’t in the warehouse, then where was she?
“Volkov, she isn’t here,” Liam O’Leary bit out. I could tell he’d been
trying to keep it together for his family’s sake, but he was unraveling before me with every passing moment.
This was his baby girl—the last remnant of the life he had with his beloved wife. Had he been granted a new daughter in Katya, only to have Kirsten ripped away from him?
It wasn’t something I wanted to dwell on.
Sergei didn’t respond, but he pulled out his cell phone and spoke to someone, angrily, in Russian. When finally he hung up, he looked confused.
“She’s here with that Feldman guy. My men got one of the traitors to talk. They definitely came here.”
“So where are they?” both Patrick and Matt exclaimed in exasperation.
“There’s no way he escaped with her,” Katya said in a small voice. “How did your men get away without us seeing them, Sergei?”
“Around the back. There’s another door, but my men said there were no tracks—human, car, or otherwise. They had men guarding the back door the whole time they were here. This Feldman guy couldn’t have possibly escaped that way with Kirsten.”
Ian punched a television box that sat upon a stray pallet in frustration. The stack of boxes moved forward on its wheels just a few inches.
“Shit! Shit…”
Ian’s curses became muted in my head as I stared at the pallets. There were six of them in total. Four were against the wall, but two of them stood a few feet in front of the others.
“Ian,” I murmured, then yelled, “Ian!”
I pushed away one of the pallets. Ian caught on to what I was doing and pushed the other one away.
There beneath our feet was a door. I put my ear against it and could barely hear the sound of movement. With shaking hands, I tried to open it, but it was sealed shut with a lock.
Everyone surrounded me, Ian, and the door at this point. “It’s locked,” I said simply. “We need something—anything—to open it.”
Katya rushed to my side, dropping to her knees with a knife in her hand. I looked at her, and she raised an eyebrow.
“Why do you all keep forgetting how I was brought up? I’ve got this.”
Katya worked on the lock with deft hands, making quick work of the mechanism with her knife until it clicked open.
I wasted no time hauling the thick, heavy door open. As soon as it was open, I heard Kirsten’s muffled cries clear as day.
“Kirsten!” I screamed as I vaulted down the stairs. I was blind with rage and fear, barely conscious of the fact that Ian and his father and brother followed closely behind me.
I saw her. I saw my Kirsten, bloody and bruised, desperately trying to push Feldman away as he held a hand over her mouth. There were tears streaming down her face, but she’d given as good as she got. Feldman’s arms were covered in bleeding, weeping scratch marks.
I threw myself at the man as soon I locked eyes with him, throwing him off Kirsten in seconds. My fist connected with the side of his face, again and again and again. The man was too shocked to respond. I was too strong. Too determined. Too damn angry.
I wanted to kill him, law be damned. I was going to kill him.
Instead, Ian pulled me off the asshole.
“Let him rot in prison, Rafe.”
I stared at him, not quite believing what I heard. “You punch me in the face for sneaking out your sister’s window, but you’re against me beating the shit out of this psychopath?”
“I don’t want you to go to prison for murdering his scum ass, that’s all. It’s not worth it.” And then, as if proving a point, he picked up the barely conscious Feldman by the collar of his shirt and swiftly punched him in the face. “See? I have nothing against merely beating him up.”
“Unfortunately, I do,” Charles interjected, moving Ian out of the way to cuff Feldman. As he read the man his rights, I swung my head around to look at Kirsten.
She hadn’t moved from her position on the floor, clearly in shock.
“Rafe?” she croaked out. She just barely moved her eyes to take in the rest of the people in the basement. “You all…found me.”
I collapsed by her side, pulling her into my arms and keeping her pressed against my chest.
“We did…of course, we did. Can’t believe you ever doubted us.”
She glanced past me. “Da?”
Liam got down on his knees by my side, stroking Kirsten’s hair away from her face as he smiled at her, tears streaming down his face. “I’m here, love. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You’ve got some ‘splaining to do,” Kirsten mumbled as she passed out against my chest.
“We need to get her to a hospital,” Ian said.
Patrick already had his phone in his hand. He moved like lightning up the stairs to make the call. In the distance, I could barely hear police sirens.
If we had waited for Charles’ backup, we really would have been too late. I didn’t want to think about what might have happened had we found Kirsten any later than we did.
“What the hell?” a garbled voice said. It was Brian, barely conscious and struggling to speak through the mess I’d made of his face. “Lucky O’Leary working with the head of the Russian mob. What the—hell?”
“You underestimate what I’ll do for my family,” Liam replied coldly. His fists were clenched and shaking. I had no doubt he wanted to murder the asshole who’d dared to lay a hand on both his wife and daughter even more than I did. “Though I’m surprised you didn’t know that, given what happened last time.”
“So long as I’m alive, you haven’t won.”
Liam’s icy silence spoke volumes.
Feldman wasn’t worth his time. He was done. The man no longer existed. If I knew Lucky O’Leary, Feldman’s days were numbered.
Several policemen appeared and took Feldman out of the basement first. I carried Kirsten out, followed by her family and Sergei.
“You helped me stamp out the traitors who wanted me out, and I helped you find your daughter, so we’re even, O’Leary,” I heard Sergei murmur to Liam as the ambulance arrived.
“What you did for me was more than I did for you, Volkov. Consider me owing you a favor in thanks.”
I could tell Sergei was grinning without seeing it. “I’ll hold you to that.” There was no doubt he would. Debts were always paid.
Only one of us was allowed to sit in the ambulance with Kirsten. I stood aside to let her father climb in, but he shook his head.
“You go, Rafe. We wouldn’t have known what was going on as quickly as we did if it weren’t for you.”
If it weren’t for Dean, you mean, I thought humbly, angry beyond measure at myself, but I nodded my head.
“I’ll see you all at the hospital.”
As I sat beside an unconscious Kirsten, I finally had time to look at her thoroughly. Half of the wounds on her were clearly the result of her having fought like the scrappy, reckless idiot she was. God, I’d never loved that part of her as much as I did now. It was likely the only thing that had kept Feldman at bay long enough for us to find her in time.
God, I loved her so much. I wasn’t going to waste any more of my life—or hers—finding reasons not to tell her that.
I’d tell her every day. I’d tell her every hour.
I loved Kirsten O’Leary, and nothing was going to stop me from loving her forever.
I just had to make sure I used a door to visit her from now on.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I slept for almost three full days. It wasn’t the kind of sleep that felt like any time had passed while I was unconscious. It didn’t feel as though I’d only been asleep momentarily either. I didn’t know how to explain it. I’d expected to feel disoriented, foggy and confused after waking up from so much sleep, but instead, I felt refreshed and renewed.
Well…except for the tender bruises and stinging cuts slowly healing across my body, and the ache of my severely sprained ankle.
With the pain came all the memories associated with it. I shivered in my hospital bed despite myself, but my father was sitting there
watching me, and his eyes lit up when he saw me awake. He cried as he held my hand and felt me shake and then called for the doctor, who took my vitals, had a nurse bring me food and water, then gave me a low dose of a sedative to help calm my nerves.
When the shaking subsided, my father sat by my head and stroked my hair.
“I am so sorry, my baby girl.”
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for, Da,” I half-croaked, my voice hoarse from disuse. I gulped down some water, coughed a little, then repeated the sentiment.
My father sighed. “I have everything to be sorry for.”
“Really, what were you supposed to do about a Russian mob coup and a psychopath?”
“I could have killed the man after he attacked your mother. I should have killed him before he attacked your mother, and then maybe…”
“Da, don’t you dare say any of those things,” I said firmly, though a tight lump in my throat threatened tears. “That’s not who you are. If you had killed him, then you might not be here, and you definitely wouldn’t be the man I’m proud to call my Da.”
He was silent. Clearly, he didn’t know what to say.
“Just tell me one thing.”
“What, my love?”
“Tell me the full story. Tell me everything about this—this Feldman guy, and how he knew Mom. Tell me the real story of how you ended up together. I somehow doubt the warped version I got from him is the truth.”
My father’s face darkened at the mere thought of Feldman having given me an account of what happened, but then the darkness was gone and he smiled sadly.
“Of course, Kirsten. I should have told you long ago.”
The story was tough to hear, and awful—terrible, so terrible—but I smiled along with my father when he told me about how he’d protected my mother with no ulterior motive whatsoever. How his ‘fake’ relationship with her had blossomed into something genuine, and how this resulted in them marrying straight out of high school, so completely and utterly in love with each other.
Despite the awful things that had happened, we both laughed and cried bittersweet tears by the end of my father’s explanation.
Betting On Us (Wilde Love Book 3) Page 15
